It's currently Wednesday, September 16th and I just wanted to talk a little bit about something that I've been telling myself recently.
As artificial intelligence becomes more and more intelligent, I do have this fear that we're heading towards a society where people start to not think critically for themselves and I'm already beginning to see that in students at my tutoring job and it feels like we're offloading all the wrong things to artificial intelligence, things like learning things like creativity innovation.
People are not really striving for independent thinking anymore—we're offloading those things to AI so we can spend our time doomscrolling or just staring at a wall instead of automating the boring things so we can do the creative things.
I think despite all of this, something that I tell myself is that I don't have to fall into this herd mentality and do whatever everyone else is doing because obviously that's not how you stand out and that's not how you become a unique person. I'm trying to introduce, I wouldn't say friction into my life, but trying to introduce some intentionality into my life.
When I do things like updating my website or making a to do list, instead of having AI do that, I will still write things by hand. Not to say I write code by hand, but I will write my case studies. I still keep a journal that I write by hand. When I read, I don't look to AI to give me a summary before I start. I just look at the back of the book and I start reading, actively engaging with the content as I read, discussing with myself themes, character development, things like that. Even when I design, I still try to stay away from things like, the Figma or Paper MCP. That's not to say I don't use them, I still use them, but after I've established a design direction and visual identity that I like. These tools are useful for building out ideas, but not starting them.
Doing things by hand is, I think, the best way to learn and keep your mind moving.
I know there's probably going to be people who don't align with what I have to say and they're going to wonder, you know, why am I going to make things more difficult for myself? Why am I not trying to, you know, do a thousand things in one day? I think I can do a thousand things in one day for things like, you know, coding because it can become a lot faster. Even writing, I'm speaking into Superwhisper right now, but for things that I think still require human thinking, I want to keep those as authentic as they can be.
I guess I can say that this brings me relief because I know that I'm doing all that I can to keep my mind alive and from deteriorating into the AI dependency era that I feel like we're heading towards. It does feel a little scary though, and I wish I could teach my students that it is still important to think for themselves. People might argue I feel like AI knows so much more than me because it's trained on so much data.
And yeah, I would say that that's true for sure. Like AI is definitely smarter than, you know, me as an engineer. But I think there are still things about our very human experiences that AI can't replicate. Those experiences show in areas like design or writing.Art is at its most powerful when it's been made with love.
What fun is it to live if we don't actively partake in our lives?
In my day to day life, when before I want to search something on Google, I try to ask myself "can I actually explain this to another person?" because I might actually know it but I'm falling into this pit of convenience with AI. I think that gives me a little bit of relief that I'm still able to think critically and apply my experiences to any sort of problem, whether that is technological or design or social, that I might encounter. I don't just immediately defer to my AI and ask what I should do or think.